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Thursday, July 14, 2016

Port Said emerges as Egypt’s focal point of soccer-driven protest

Port Said, the Suez Canal city associated with the worst
incident in Egyptian sporting history, is emerging as a prime locus of soccer-driven
protest in a country that does not brook dissent.

Repeated protests in the city are laden with soccer’s
tangled involvement and key role in the 2011 popular revolt that toppled
President Hosni Mubarak; subsequent opposition to the military regime that
succeeded him; deep-seated polarization over the role of Islam in public life
evoked by the 2012 election of Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and Egypt’s
first and only democratically elected president; and the 2013 military coup
that removed him from office.

Mr. Ibrahim was accused of assaulting a policeman at the end
of his club’s last match of the season. A video camera caught Mr. Hassan running
after the policeman and punching him in the face. The policeman was reportedly
a plainclothes photographer working for Egypt’s feared interior ministry. The
Egyptian Football Association (EFA) penalized Mr. Hassan by suspending him for
three matches and fining him $1,100.

The incident involves a twist of irony given that Mr. Hassan
was a fervent supporter of Mr. Mubarak, who built the interior ministry and its
police and security forces into a powerful, corrupt and feared force that is a
law unto itself and became Egypt’s most despised institution.

Mr. Hassan, together with his twin brother, Ibrahim Hassan, an
equally storied player, led demonstrations against the anti-Mubarak protesters
in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February 2011. Militant, street-battled hardened soccer
fans were prominent in and played a key role in those protests. Messrs. Hassan
urged Mr. Mubarak at the time to cut off food and medical supplies to the
square.

Things have gone from bad to worse since Mr. Mubarak’s
departure with repression of opposition having reached unprecedented levels
under general-turned-president Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi, the military officer who
toppled Mr. Morsi, outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, and has arrested tens of
thousands of his Islamist and non-Islamist critics.

Human
rights group Amnesty International charged this week that Egypt’s National
Security Agency (NSA) was abducting, torturing and forcibly disappearing people
in an effort to intimidate opponents and wipe out peaceful dissent.

“Hundreds of students, political activists and protesters,
including children as young as 14, vanish without trace at the hands of the
state… Many are held for months at a time and often kept blindfolded and handcuffed
for the entire period,” the group said in a report.

Thousands of people led by Al Masri fans and members of
parliament from Port Said marched through Port Said in February after Mr.
Al-Sisi, in an unprecedented gesture to some of his opponents reached out to
Ultras Ahlawy, Al Masri’s arch rival and the militant support group of storied
Cairo club Al Ahli FC, once Mr. Hassan’s soccer home.

The gesture came as Al Ahli fans commemorated the death of 72
of their members in a politically loaded soccer brawl in Port Said’s stadium in
February 2012. The fans were either beaten, stabbed or crushed to death in
Egypt’s worst sporting incident by supporters of Al Masri and unidentified men
believed to have been thugs who are regularly employed by the security forces.

The incident was widely seen as an attempt by the security
forces and the military that got out of control to teach Ultras Ahlawy a lesson
because of its prominent role in protests against Mr. Mubarak and his military
successors. A Cairo court initially sentenced 21 lower class Al Masri fans to
death in a case in which 73 people, including nine police officers were charged
with being responsible for the incident. Egyptian stadiums have been closed to
the public ever since.

The verdict sparked a popular revolt in Port Said and other
Suez Canal cities. In appeal, the number of death sentences was reduced to 11.
Some 40 people were killed during protests in January 2013 after the initial
verdict outside Port Said prison where the convicted were being held.

This February the protesters were upset with Mr. Al-Sisi’s invitation
to Ultras Ahlawy, made in a surprise phone call to a local television talk show,
to name ten of its members who would be allowed to investigate the brawl. The
ultras rejected the invitation, saying they could not act simultaneously as
accuser and judge, and demanded that Mr. Al-Sisi allow for an independent investigation.
Mr. Al-Sisi failed to respond.

Many in Port Said feel that their city has for decades been
neglected by governments in Cairo and that it was being scapegoated in the wake
of the soccer incident for what was in their view a manipulative move by
authorities that went badly wrong. Port Said’s sense of being the government’s
afterthought comes to life whenever Al Masri and Al Ahli lock horns on the
soccer pitch.

Leila Zaki Chakravart, a London School of Economics scholar
who spent 18 months in Port Said for research, recalled in an article in Open
Democracy six weeks after the Port Said incident “how the coastal
Mediterranean city’s self-styled laissez faire lifestyle of almost sleepy
monotony abruptly changed gear on the day each year on which the Al-Masri/Al-Ahli
fixture was scheduled. Tension rose rapidly before the event, and a
self-imposed curfew descended ensuring that only the city’s male population
patronised its streets and public spaces,” Ms. Chakravart wrote.

She noted that all Egyptian cities were soccer-mad but that “Port
Said is a city which takes its football fervour to the extreme. Boys learn to
dribble from the time they can walk, and street football games are played out
as passionately as the city’s sole professional football club is supported.
Even the club’s choice of name (Al Masri means The Egyptian) provides telling
evidence of how the city’s distinctive regional brand of martial patriotism,
forged during the (1956) Suez invasion and later wars with Israel, is
concretely rooted in and expressed through the tribal loyalties which football
brings out,” Ms Chakravart said.

It’s those tribal loyalties that are again sparking protest.
The protests have as much to do with soccer as they have to do with fault lines
in Egyptian society that have been sharpened in the five years since the downfall
of Mr. Mubarak.

Egyptians have since watched as the Tahrir Square revolutionaries
proved incapable of translating their initial victory into a sustainable transition,
the military contributed to the impasse by focusing on retaining its
decades-long grip on power and the perks that come with it, and the Muslim
Brotherhood failed to successfully manoeuvre a minefield populated by ancien
regime institutions seeking to salvage what could be salvaged and many ordinary
people demanding economic improvement and political change.

Egyptians are left with Mr. Al-Sisi who appears to believe that
brutal repression is the solution. Yet, even Mr. Al-Sisi appears to be groping
for a way out of the malaise. His gesture to the ultras was a first attempt.
Persistent reports of Mr. Al-Sisi and the Brotherhood feeling their way towards
a potential
reconciliation is another. The protests in Port Said suggest that for many
a breaking of the impasse cannot come soon enough.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile